Due to numerous requests, we have extend the deadline of OGK2011 to June
17, 2011
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AAAI 2011 Fall Symposium
Open Government Knowledge: AI Opportunities and Challenges
4-6 November 2011 â€¢ Arlington, Virginia USA
paper due: June 17, 2011
homepage: http://tw.rpi.edu/ogk2011
submission site: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ogk2011
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The 2011 AAAI Fall Symposium on Open Government Knowledge: AI
Opportunities and
Challenges (OGK2011) seeks papers on all aspects of publishing public
government data as reusable knowledge on the Web. Both long papers
presenting
research results and shorter papers describing late breaking work, outlining
implemented systems, identifying new research challenges, or articulating a
position are invited. Submissions are due by June 17, notifications will
be sent
by July 15, and the final camera-ready copy must be provided by September 9,
2011.
Background
Websites like data.gov, research.gov and USASpending.gov aim to improve
government transparency, increase accountability, and encourage public
participation by publishing public government data online. Although
industry and academia have used these for some intriguing applications,
the data in its present form is hard for citizens to understand and use.
Research and deployment challenges emerging from open government data
practices include the following.
* Scalability. How can we search, access and reuse the hundreds of
thousands of datasets from data.gov as well the much larger number of
datasets directly available at federal agencies' website? Is there an
organic way to dramatically increase the amount of open government data
in a distributed and collaborative fashion?
* Interoperability. Multi-scale open government data came from city
governments, state governments, and national governments. How can one
compare the GDP of the US and China, and later link to state-level
financial data? Open government data covers many domains. How can one
associate open government data with domain knowledge to build, e.g. a
cancer prevention application?
* Provenance and quality. How should provenance be leveraged to
facilitate high-quality data management interactions (e.g. reuse,
mash-up and feedback) and community participation between the government
and the public?
* Citizen Involvement. How can linked data application sites encourage
more citizen participation for comments and contributions, and then how
can these more diverse contributions be tracked, managed, validated, and
evaluated?
Several approaches have been proposed to address these challenges. Using
semantic technologies, especially Linked Data, to enrich the value of
such data and ultimately convey the data to the citizens is one
possibility. For example, linking together Justices' backgrounds, and
related supreme court decisions has the potential to provide a better
understanding of the working of the Supreme Court. Linked Open
Government Data are enabled by Semantic Web technologies such as RDF,
RDFS, SPARQL and RDFa. Once linked, the value of government data can be
greatly increased with a potential reduction of cost (i) applications
are no longer limited to one or several datasets but can use all the
inter-connected datasets (including non-government data) on the Web;
(ii) data-as-interface allow data curators, visualizers and analysts
incrementally work on a specific smaller part of data processing
independently, (iii) linked data enables transparent data mining and
generates detailed provenance traces that allow the study of trust,
privacy and policy issues. Using crowd-sourcing to distribute the task
of building parsers and visualizers for different data.gov datasets is
another possibility. Machine learning to find and explore relationships
between data is also a possible approach.
Secondly, for governments to be able to release high quality datasets,
they must be able to express usage access and restriction policies. To
achieve this, provenance mechanisms must be provided to keep track of
which datasets have been used and how these have been combined and
policy mechanisms must be used to ensure compliance with appropriate
usage restrictions. This involves several interesting areas of research:
machine understandable usage restrictions, provenance tracking and
maintenance, and scalable reasoners capable of verifying policy compliance.
Lastly, the techniques developed for extracting semantics, using, and
sharing open government datasets can also be applied to closed/secure
datasets for applications such as sharing private information
within/across agencies, and integrating electronic health records across
healthcare organizations. In this symposium, we invite input from
diverse communities including but not limited to: government data
publishers, developers, user communities who run real systems and
generate demand for new technologies, and the AI community who can
provide solutions and advance the research in the areas specified above.
The location of symposium is extremely attractive since a lot of open
government data practitioners are conveniently located in Washington, DC.
Suggested Topics include but are not limited to the following
* Automatic and semi-automatic creation of linked data resources
* General ontologies for open linked government data
* Entity linking and co-reference detection between linked data resources
* Adding temporal qualifications to government data
* Creating mash-ups with open government data
* Scalable solutions for linking open government data
* Linked open government data analysis
* Semantic technologies for government data and applications
* Representing and propagating provenance metadata
* Policies for information sharing, use, and privacy
* Managing usage restrictions and privacy of government data
* Metadata for certainty and trust in linked open government data
* Social networks in government data
* Publishing results of machine learning applied to open government data
* Visualization of open government data revealing underlying patterns
and relations
Symposium structure
This single track symposium will run from 9:00am Friday November 4 until
12:30pm Sunday November 6 and include a mixture of invited talks, paper
presentations, panels, system demonstrations, a poster session, and
discussions. We plan to have several invited speakers, e.g., a US
federal Government representative addressing the current status of the
US open government initiative, a researcher discussing open challenges
and a W3C staff member describing the role of current and future
standards in government knowledge. We will also have a panel to address
the emerging issue of health informatics, the potential nationwide
health information network, where private health data and public
governmental data are interconnected. We are also interested in running
a half-day tutorial/hack-a-thon to provide attendees hands-on
experiences in creating Linked Open Government Data and building mashups.
Submissions
We invite submissions of full papers (up to eight pages) presenting
research results, short papers (up to four pages) defining a position,
and statement of interests (up to two pages), articulating a new problem
or describing a working system. All accepted papers will be published in
a proceedings issued as a AAAI technical report. Papers should be
original material that has not been previously published or under review
for another venue. Late breaking ideas are encouraged as the subject of
a short papers. Papers must be prepared in AAAI format and submitted
using the ogk2011 easychair site
(http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ogk2011).
Important dates
* 17 June 2011 Submit papers using the ogk2011 site
* 15 July 2011 Notifications sent to authors
* 9 Sept 2011 Camera ready papers due
* 16 Sept 2011 author registration deadline
* 14 Oct 2011 Open pre-registration deadline
* 3 Nov 2011 AI Funding seminar
* 4-6 Nov 2011 Fall Symposium
General symposium information
General information on the 2011 AAAI Fall Symposia will be available
from the 2011 AAAI FSS Website. This includes information about
deadlines, registration, location, transportation, and hotel accommodations.
Organizers
* Li Ding, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
* Tim Finin, UMBC
* Lalana Kagal, MIT
* Deborah McGuinness, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Program committee
* Hal Abelson, MIT, USA
* Quan Bai, CSIRO, Australia
* David Chadwick, Kent University, UK
* Vinay Chaudhri, SRI, USA
* Nick Gibbins, University of Southampton, UK
* Karthik Gomadam, Accenture Technology Labs, USA
* Stuart Graham, USPTO, USA
* Alon Halevy, Google, USA
* Andreas Harth, KIT, DE
* Michael Hausenblas, DERI Galway, Irland
* Sandro Hawke, W3C, USA
* Anupam Joshi, UMBC, USA
* David Karger, MIT, USA
* Gary Katz, MarkLogic, USA
* Qing Liu, CSIRO, Australia
* Ashok Malhotra, Oracle, USA
* Natasha Noy, Stanford University, USA
* Theresa Pardo, SUNY Albany, USA
* Vassilios Peristeras, European Commission, Belgium
* Alexander Pretschner, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
* Alan Ruttenberg, SUNY Buffalo, USA
* Satya Sahoo, Case Western Reserve, USA
* Abdul Shaikh, NIH/NCI, USA
* Kavitha Srinivas, IBM Research, USA
* Joshua Tauberer, POPVOX, USA
* George Thomas, HHS, USA
* Curt Tilmes, NASA Goddard, USA
* Evelyne Viegas, Microsoft Research, USA
* David Wood, Talis, UK
* Peter Yeh, Accenture Technology Labs, USA
* Harlan Yu, Princeton, USA